Kitchen & Household Hints
1. Sticky Blender: fill blender half full of warm water, add a drop of your dish liquid, turn on high for a few seconds.
2. Make butter curls with a potato peeler. Fill a dish with ice water and put in the curls. When you need them take out as many as you need. They soften fast. This also works when you need thin slices for something right away, use peeler and you get thin slices that will soften quickly.
3. Apple Sauce, cottage cheese, sour cream and yogurt won't mold as fast if you turn the jar or container upside down in the refrigerator (make sure the lids are on very well).
4. When my children were growing up, one of the arguments I got tired of hearing was "He-She got a bigger piece than me. To solve this problem, I let them take turns cutting whatever the item was and the other 2 got first choice (whoever was the last to cut was the first to choose). Talk about have a new respect for "fair".
5. Ice Cream Scoops: You know the things I'm talking about, they come in many sizes and materials. I have invested over the years, in good stainless steel ones in many different sizes. I use them to make cookies (everyone thinks I bought the cookies at a bakery they are so uniform) meatballs, rice, mashed potatoes, vegetable dishes.
6. Cutting tomatoes with your good knives dulls them badly (the acidity). Go to the dollar store and buy one of those serrated ones and use it just for tomatoes, throw it away when it gets dull and buy another one.
7. Do you ever need a cup of buttermilk and have to buy a quart for that cup? Me too. In a pinch I put 1 tablespoon of lemon juice or vinegar in a 1 cup measuring cup and finish with milk. When I can find it I buy this powdered buttermilk mix and keep it in the freezer (last longer there). All you have to do is add it to water and you have buttermilk.
8. Steam carrots, zucchini, eggplant, squash, and any other mild tasting vegetable, then put in blender and whirrrrr away. Now, use this puree in sauces, like spaghetti sauce, or stew, or soup. They add richness, and vegetables to your diet and your kids who won't eat veggies at all will eat them and never complain.
9. Put up those herbs from your garden for the winter months when they are scarce. Dry them in the oven or freeze them fresh for use in the future. To
dry in oven, I place them on parchment paper like I use to bake cookies on. Line cookie sheets with the parchment and bake in a 250F oven until dry. Cool. Store in glass jar with tight fitting lids.
To freeze: Put water in a blender (about 1/3 full of water) and drop 3 or 4 handfuls of herbs in and whirr with quick on and off movements of the blender. Keep a few
cheap ice trays around just for this process. Put this processed herb mixture in the ice
cube trays and freeze. When frozen, pop the ice trays in a labeled zip lok bag and keep in freezer ready for use. Each cube is about 2 tablespoons of herbs
10. When rolling pie crust or cookies, sprinkle the area with powdered sugar to avoid that pasty, flour taste. It will do the same job as flour and bakes nicely into the crust or cookie.
11. To pop the core out of lettuce, rap the core on the cabinet, then just pull it out and wrap in a paper towel, and put in a zip lock bag, making sure all air is out. Change the paper towel each time you take the lettuce out to use it. This also will keep the lettuce longer.
12. Pasta Pot Boil Overs: If you get to your pot of boiling pasta and it is getting ready to erupt over the edge, blow on it! This will give you enough time to turn the fire down and remove the pot and prevent a huge starchy mess.
13. Need a container for oil to use in small quantities, try using one of those squirt bottles mustard and other condiments come in. They dispense a small amount at a time, which is what you really need when you are cooking.
14. Found this out quiet by accident. I left the bbq racks from my grill on the lawn over night and got rewarded the next morning. The racks just had to be hosed off and they were clean. My husband said it was the chemical reaction from the moisture on the grass and the make up of the grass that did the cleaning.
15. You do this with jellied cranberry, why not tomato paste? I always open both ends of the can for the cranberry, why not the paste too? Cut both ends and then push one of the lids through and out comes all the paste!
16. Don't you hate to clean a baking sheet, I know I do. Line the baking sheet with aluminum foil, dull side up. When finished, wad it up and throw it away. I don't do this for cakes, cookies and desserts just for things like baked potatoes, oven baked french fries, loose sticky items that stick to the baking pan. I spray with oil first.
17. Ever get some celery that tastes bitter? It is beautiful, crisp ,full, and bitter. Cut off the big end (root end), fix a quart size pitcher with water and a tablespoon of sugar, stir to dissolve, add celery and put in refrigerator. The bitter taste will subside and the celery will remain crisp and last longer.
18. Eradicate Fruit Flies from your life. I use vinegar for many things and found out it gets rid of fruit flies too, quiet by accident. To get rid of odors, I put a little bowl of vinegar or if a large area I use several with a drop of dish liquid in each. I had a compote of fresh fruit on the table and the fruit flies were buzzing. By the evening all the fruit flies were gone. So, after that incident, when I put fresh fruit on the table, I use a small container with vinegar and a drop of dish liquid in it next to the bowl and have no fruit flies. Will also get rid of unwanted odors.
19. Hands have a really fishy smell or some other nausea making odor, use salt. Wet your hands and put some salt in them and rub it in well then rinse.
20. I use a lot of fresh Ginger to cook with, and because it is expensive, I don't want to lose a morsel of it. When I get it home from the store, I put it in a freezer zip lok bag splash a little water in it (to keep from drying
out) and freeze. When I need some, I take it our, grate what I need in the food I am preparing and throw it back in the freezer. It will keep for months this way. No need to peel it either.
21. Did you know that the top from a catsup bottle and the top of a cooking oil bottle are the same size? They are, at least the brands I use. I wash the catsup bottle top and use it on the oil bottle and it makes for slow pouring when you need just a little.
22. Use baking soda to clean white porcelain sinks. It will take out black marks left by pots and pans and is safer for the porcelain than abrasive cleansers.
23. Cut off a generous piece from both ends of oranges, lemons and limes when using them for cooking, put in zip lok bag and put in freezer. When you need grated citrus rind, (usually need just a teaspoon or so) use the frozen pieces, they grate very easy when frozen. I also use them for my garbage disposal when it gets smelly (throw a few frozen pieces in and grind away)
24. I am the worlds messiest cook, especially in the oven. I also tend to create oven fires on occasion. I use salt to put out the fires, and the benefit is it removes the odor and makes clean up easier. So if you don't make fires in your oven, you do create
messes, so sprinkle the salt on it and the odor will be gone and clean up easier.
25. I must have put up 50 bushels of corn this past year and tried every method known to man to get the silk off. The easiest way I found was to wet a toothbrush and brush downward on the corncob. Just about every piece of silk will come off.
26. I loved this suggestion for putting up apples for apple pie or nearly any fresh fruit in season. Peel, core and chop apples as you would for an apple pie. Put apples in a large bowl and add ingredients that you use for an apple pie, sugar, cinnamon, flour etc. and mix it up really well. Put the apple slices into several aluminum pie pans lined with wax paper. Cover and freeze. When you want to fill a pie crust, just pop your frozen pie-shaped filling into the crust, dot with butter and bake (don't forget to remove the wax paper before baking).
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